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02 May 2012 | Viewed 255 times

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Enterprise Web Hosting Buyer's Guide

Author: Ziff Davis Research

The history of Web hosting began with the advent of the Internet. And like the Internet, enterprise Web hosting continues to evolve. Enterprise organizations now have more choices than ever when shopping for a Web-hosting provider, from traditional colocation vendors that offer military levels of physical security to cloud-computing providers that give companies access to bleeding-edge hosting technology.

Forrester Research Inc., identifies five stages of Web hosting. Hosting began with ISP 1.0, in which a
company plugged a desktop PC directly into the Internet via a dial-up connection, ISDN (Integrated Services Digital Network), or a TI or T3 line. ISP 2.0 put an organization's server at an Internet access point. ISP 3.0 is colocation services, which install a company's racks of server hardware at an Internet access point at a highly secure facility. ISP 4.0 refers to application service providers, which host a company's applications on their servers. ISP 5.0 is the quickly emerging service called cloud computing, which provides a dynamic, scalable infrastructure for an organization's Web applications.

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